Tuesday, April 18, 2017

This extremely interesting book, full of
autoethnographic details, and presenting a fictionalised view of history is
worth reading. Social Scientists will find in this book, an unerring eye for
detail. It describes the contemporary situationofCambodians, in the 21st
century, who were simultaneously victims
and perpetuators of one of the most forceful genocides in history, where the
Khmer killed one another. Who can forget the symmetrical way in which skulls were
lined up like pineapples would be traditionally, in an aesthetic fashion, by
the Khmer Rouge. Angelina Joli and Clive Owens have dramatically shown us the
way in which the ruralbackdrop of
Cambodia was rendered violent and murderous in their fictional but terrifyingly
authentic portrayal of those gruesome years in “Beyond Borders”, which
describes Aid Workers as they move from war torn country to country.

Joseph, however, uses humour to tell the story of the post
construction years of rebuilding Cambodia, with the help of United Nations Aid
Agencies. As someone who lived in Phnom Penh for eight years, he grew to love
Cambodia. Underlying the continuous retrospection and amusement, however, was
the macabre, the still life, which always appeared to him in terms of a history
of suppressions. For sociologists the suppressions are always important, and
the opacity of the present can only be understood in terms of what it is that
people want to hide. MP Joseph uses key figures, not in a stereotypical
biographical way, but more in terms of the use of the “linguistic shifter” where each person he describes is replayed in
relation to the fictitious protagonist. This person shares the same name as the author, and
occupies the identical position of authority of dispersing funds for Aid and
Development in post Pol Pot Cambodia. What is amazing and quirky is that the
individuals he describes are essentially his office administrator, his cooks,
his teacher of Khmer grammar, and the restaurateur who is a colourful refugee,
and of course his Driver, Tulong.Josephprovides us with his
recollections, rather like a Dictaphone would do, with alarming nuances, of how
their spoken interactions with him, tell us about how pidgin develops mutually.
This tacit exchange establishes equality, a subconscious inflexion of French,
with consonants and end syllables, which
creates a new form of discourse between him and these star persona in the world
of the underlings, who have innate power over those in authority. As Joseph describes it, “The French who had
colonised Cambodia and most of Indo-China for about hundred years had taught
them to drop that last consonant while pronouncing any word in the Latin
script” .(15)There is nothing subaltern about their discourse, each one uses
language to both confound and explain, and in the confusion that results
between Joseph and his Aides, the release of new meanings, new emotions make us
laugh, surprising us by the tactile quality of these interventions.

Yet, this book is written with the idea
that information is by itself political, whether we like it or not. The author is
fearless and completely in control. He fictionalises the organisation, but not
the people, and the way in which they manipulate reality. For Joseph, the true
narrative is contextualised in Pierre Bourdieu’s
preoccupation with strategies and white lies, where the everydayness of social encounter is
placed exactly within the questions of how people negotiate and manipulate and
come out completely triumphant because they have made sense of their world, and
persuaded the Other. Vectors of meaning,
they are encapsulated in their own histories, be it Sri Lankan, Indian,
Cambodian. Each persona who informs this
complex narrative is tragic and yet caught in a skein of Joseph’s humour, which
relieves us of some of the pain of witnessing their terrible circumstances.

Time is the other trope Joseph uses to
enhance our understanding of pidgin use in Cambodia, where telegraphic speech,
aphorisms and lightening strikes of decimated sentences compresses past and
present for the user. Joseph knows full well that in this juxtaposition of a
civilizational memory, and the functional use of the present where
communication must be immediate, speaker and listener must be able to fully
understand one another. As in dialogue, there must be no withholding.The office administrator, who gets to hold a
position in Joseph’s fund delivering office,the tensions that unfoldbetween
them, the mutual bullying that goes on between boss and employee is an
excellent understanding of Bureaucracy, where the pristine ledger and clock
time give way to shared food as a combustible space of mutual aggrandisement.
The Administrator knows that he can control information, but Joseph or his
alter ego, is no stranger to bullying and manipulating. His serene
understanding that power corrupts totally is the subtext of this elegant book.
He domesticates the hand holding and bribing, and opportunities to be venal that
the bureaucrat in multinational ventures is used to, but cannot reveal.

The author’s sense of valour comes from an
unselfconscious certitude, which has it’s source in his lineage as a St Thomas Christian from Kerala. He uses his traditionally historical status with
regard to aristocracy, closeness to power and material comfort to actually
describe for us how Charities and International Conferences work. As a diatribe
on how money is spent in Aid Organisations, and how power and influence are
wielded, where money is released to help the poor but is actually an excuse to
jet set and eat fine food, and meet interesting politicians and intellectuals,
Joseph is completely effervescent. He knows no guilt about disclosing the
innards of the life of the poor or the rich, he takes a ringside view on how
lampooning in social science, like the pamphletand the novel must have methodological resonance.

We have to take this book seriously,
particularly the section where he describes the experience of the children who
are recoveringfrom the violence they
have seen, or have personally committed against family members, neighbours and
friends, during the Khmer Rouge period. The pathos of their bewilderment, the
numbed terror of all they have known is brought out by Joseph instriking prose. As an extension of this, he
writes about his teacher Sim, a young woman who struggles to get out ofpoverty by studying Law at the University, and
teaching foreigners Khmer language. During this time, Joseph discovers that the
Cambodians have the same names for the
calendar months like the Malayalees in Kerala have. This is such a fortuitous
discovery, that he spends most of his time with all his language teachers, providing them an
etymology for words in Khmer that are similar to Malayalam, and to Sanskrit.
Most of his previous teachers hastily depart, since his excitement at
discovering these similarities was so huge, he would reverse roles and becometeacher,
brow beating the Cambodians to accept that Khmer words were indeed Indian in
origin and accordingly, should be
pronounced correctly. With Sim, he learned to concentrate and to begin to
learn, but alas, she gets killed by robbers on her way home one night. The
sorrow that permeates this book disturbs. Yet, Joseph’s sense of humour, his
ability to laugh at himself, and to make the world appear insouciant and transparent, is the power that he has. How to
make the everyday complicated by the detail of description is his greatest
skill, and it would be useful for those going to Cambodia for work or pleasure,
to understand how boundary making (or dissolving) between the French, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and Indians
continually happens in Indo China. Food and Language are the motifs that he
best works with, but also Cars, as Roland Barthes would recommend.